The business of football
Market, transfers and what players are really worth.
The CJEU did not correct one article of the transfer regulations. It stripped away the two administrative mechanisms FIFA used to enforce its decisions without going through any court. The only way back requires FIFA to stop dictating rules and start negotiating them.
Read · 6 min read →
The Court of Justice of the EU has replaced market price with book value as the measure of what it costs to break a contract. The bill will be paid first by the clubs that produce footballers, not by those that buy them.
Read · 7 min read →
England does not compete with the rest of Europe in the transfer market: it finances it. Italy responds with accounting engineering, Germany by selling before buying, and Spain by concentrating all its purchasing power in three clubs. Four economic models that are no longer playing the same game.
Read · 11 min read →
Italian clubs are the world's second-biggest buyers again, but this summer is explained less by what they spend and more by how they account for it
Read · 8 min read →
Germany was the third European league by investment, closed the transfer window in surplus and keeps all 18 clubs in operating profit. The problem is not the money: it is that its business model depends on being the middle rung of a ladder that the Premier League is beginning to skip.
Read · 6 min read →
The Premier League's summer window spent more than the other four major leagues combined, but almost 40 per cent of the money never left England. An anatomy of an inflation the Premier League manufactures for itself.
Read · 10 min read →
Spanish football has started investing again, but the figure conceals a two-economy league: three balance sheets buying abroad and seventeen surviving by selling.
We know a team needs talent and that how it is distributed barely matters. What nobody knows is how to identify it before it becomes obvious.
From sporting directors to club presidents, the entire industry consults the figures of a fan community that does not even charge for its work.
The narrative of the 'tax dilemma' that would make domestic Premier League signings cheaper than foreign ones rests on two technical errors and one omission: VAT is neutral, the levy is paid in both cases equally, and the only real difference — FIFA's 5% solidarity contribution — never stops a hundred-million deal. What stopped Álvarez was something else entirely.
Developing players pays off, and not because of the capital gain on selling them, which is what everyone cites. It pays off because development spending does not count towards the salary cap, because every homegrown player avoids a signing, and because the club builds up sellable players who never appear on the balance sheet.
The club that paid 222 million for Neymar has put on the robe of financial restraint. Selective memory is an elite sport, and they compete hard in that one too.
